One Year Program The NextGen Academy (NGA) is a year long program designed to help youth discover their full potential through activities that challenge and empower them to believe in themselves. A large part of this process is the leadership training itself. Participants not only attend many different camps and workshops but they play an active role in making those camps and workshops possible. Part of the training is for the first years to envision, plan, evaluate and even run the workshops in the later half of the year. This process instills a sense of confidence in the members and enables them to give the presentations and the reports for the workshops that they are responsible for. It is through these elements that participants can in fact create the program for themselves and for those who will follow in their footsteps. This is true ownership!

A key element of NGA is international service projects. The first year the group participated in a service project to the Dominican Republic and the second year the group split into teams of three and organized international service projects in five different countries spanning across Eastern Asia, specifically Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Thailand and Sri Lanka. This third year the team will also be traveling to six countries in Eastern Africa. On top of the international work, we have project development, fundraising, community outreach, and workshop developmentand many other fun and exciting activities. Each are designed to help the participants gain confidence and skills in leading others, discover who they are, and develop a relationship with God. The program is very open to input from the participants and mindful of the needs of the community.

Reflecting over the different workshops and programs, we’ve found that the challenge is not in creating excitement and high spirit during the workshop, it’s maintaining that energy after the workshop is over. NGA, with its wide variety of on-the-road activities as well as center living, allows participants to create a life of faith and attendance that is applicable in the “real world” back home.
Throughout every venture undertaken, and every endeavor pursued, the internal focus of NGA is always the same – growing internally as individuals, and cultivating our personal relationship with God, as his true children.

To paint a picture of what it might be like to be a part of the NextGen Academy, we’ve put together some highlights of what we’ve accomplished in the past few years.